Tag Archives | mashups

Gilligan is marooned on “Más a Tierra”, later renamed to Robinson Crusoe Island, with Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who had a low tolerance for bullshit

Joey (from Friends) is sent back in time to live with Fourth Earl of Sandwich, while the Earl was still working on his eponymous invention. (I recommend sending Joey back to the time when Sandwich was still using cedar boards instead of bread.)*

Transport all the characters of MASH (season 7 or after) back to the actual Korean War. This could be first offering in a series of pop culture/war mashups, which could include:

McHale’s Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar

China Beach at the Crimea

Hogan’s Hero’s at the Battle of Gaugamela (put them on Persian side for maximum laughs)

Jerry Seinfeld is sent to work at a medieval tannery in Sweinslop, Germany, without any sneaker polish

Cliff Claven and Norm Peterson join the Donner Party.

The main cast of Sex in the City visits Krakatoa, in 1883, moments before it explodes with the 13,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.

This is just the beginning. Now all we need to do is invent a working time machine, and have some kind of way of turning fictional characters into real people.

This contest ran a couple of years ago, and it was a lot of fun, so let’s do it again.

Here’s the concept: find a vintage ad, and then create a product from a created world — it can be from a book, movie, TV, etc. It doesn’t have to be science fiction; you could go with a fantasy world, an alternate reality, whatever. The only proviso is that it has to have been written by someone else, so none of your own bizarre fictional futures. Here’s a couple I mocked up, based on the grim post-apocalyptic THE ROAD and the less-grim, but still post-apocalyptic THE POSTMAN (both books worth reading, btw):

It doesn’t have to be post-apocalyptic, by the way. If you’re more of an optimistic Star Trek kind of person, then I’m happy to see Oil of Olay ads featuring Warf, scotch ads with Scotty, or ear-hair trimming systems endorsed by Quark.

How to enter:

create your masterpiece (a jpg, png, pfd or gif, please)

post it to your blog, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous … or just email it to me

let me know about it (including the work it’s based on), in the comments, by email (markarayner-at-gmail-dot-com) or Twitter (@markarayner) — let me know who to credit, and include your website if you watn